Electronic mail (email) is an important mode of business communication and increasingly becoming an important information source for litigation. Thus, the need to reproduce email and other documents is important for the individual and the company. A burden placed on any company doing business using email is the ability to reproduce the email. One way is to meet this requirement is to archive all the email. Another way is to impose document retention policies that enable a user to be able to retain email in its present state in the mailbox. This leads to the problem, however, of having huge email mailboxes that continue to grow over time. Furthermore, as the number and rate of incoming emails increases, the users tend to avoid selectively filing the messages in folders. Retention policies provide a technique for controlling this scenario to assist users in managing email, such as retaining or deleting email as desired.